My Dad’s way of dealing with my Mom’s approaching death is avoidance. It’s not that he doesn’t love her; it’s that he loves her so much he just can’t face watching her slip away.
“I’ve seen one person die in front of me, and it never leaves you,” Dad told me today. “I don’t want that to be my last memory of Gert. I’d never get over it.”
This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable rationale, but it can seem cold and uncaring to some people. All I can say in response to that is, wait until you’ve been married to the same person for fifty-five years and then we’ll talk.
So if Dad would rather help a neighbor with a paper route once in a while than be at Mom’s bedside every single second, or dream of Las Vegas travel instead of staying in a hospital all day long, I think that’s his perogative.
As Mom herself said, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances. Judging one person’s way of coping as better or worse than another’s isn’t going to help anyone.
Yet that didn’t stop someone today from telling Dad, “Mom’s in the hospital and is going to die of cancer because of you.”
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Mom’s cancer is no one’s fault except perhaps her own for spending her whole life smoking. She’s received a generous 78 years, which is a lot more than most folks who smoke.
You don’t tell a man who’s losing his wife of 55 years that he’s at fault for her death. Some things should never be said. It is the very definition of laShon hurrah.
Tags: Dad, Las Vegas travel, lashon hurrah, Mom